Tony Wright and Daniel Hurst

Beattie and Rudd: Gone is the early optimism that Queensland could save the day. Photo: Andrew Meares

'Queensland,'' one of Kevin Rudd's senior advisers declared to a Fairfax reporter in the Canberra press gallery, ''Can win this one for us.''

That was then. Kevin Rudd was a day away from announcing the September 7 election. It was deep winter.

Labor held only eight Sunshine State seats in the Federal Parliament. Why, with Kevin from Queensland restored to the prime ministerial chair and Julia Gillard - the interloper from down south - barely a memory, there seemed a chance that Labor could win an extra five or six.

Some Labor optimists imagined a return to the heady days of 2007, when the so-called Rudd-slide had delivered the ALP 15 seats in Queensland.

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It's now the first day of spring. The Queensland theory has melted with the changing of the seasons. Rudd will officially launch Labor's election campaign in his home town, Brisbane, today: Father's Day. There seems not much for this father to celebrate.

No one is talking any more about Queensland saving Labor, let alone winning the federal election for the party. Rudd's staff and members of Labor's campaign team are trying to work out what they will do next week when many will not have jobs. Some of the Prime Minister's colleagues are arguing about who might replace him as opposition leader.

Some of them knew all along the early optimism was pushing against history. Independent polling analyst Andrew Catsaras pointed out in July the Rudd-slide of 2007 was only the third time since 1949 that federal Labor had attracted more than half the two-party preferred vote in Queensland. The others were long ago: 1961 and 1990.

Labor's Queensland strategy was conceived last year, when Julia Gillard was prime minister. It was heroic in nature. It was to try to turn a state Labor disaster of unprecedented proportion into a cautionary tale about the dangers of granting power to conservatives.

It relied upon a wildly swinging public mood in the wake of the Liberal National Party's crushing win over Labor in the state election early in 2012. Labor was left with just seven seats in the Queensland Parliament, with Premier Campbell Newman's LNP holding an astonishing 78 - now down to 74 following scandals, resignations and defections. Newman's popularity had dived after his government sacked 14,000 public servants, cut services and set out to hamstring the union movement.

Following Gillard's departure, federal Labor's message was to be elucidated with greater impact by Rudd, because he was a Queenslander.

The theme: Newman's hard-tack recipe was simply the entree to what Tony Abbott's Coalition would do to Australia as a whole.

The Abbott team appeared initially to be twitchy about linking itself to the Queensland Premier, and Newman made few appearances at federal campaign events during the first weeks. But by last Sunday's official Coalition campaign launch in Brisbane, the Abbott strategists were comfortable enough to grant the Premier a prominent role. He introduced Abbott with a rousing speech in which he depicted his government, and the federal Coalition, as ''grown up'' and responsible.

The brutality of an election campaign is that it is short, just five weeks, but the compressed nature of it warps time.

It was only a bit over three weeks ago, but seems longer, when Labor tacticians were congratulating themselves and Coalition figures were plunged into deep concern up north.

Rudd and his right-hand man, former lobbyist Bruce Hawker, had persuaded Peter Beattie, immensely popular during most of the nine years he had been the state's premier, to join Labor's campaign as a candidate. It had the potential to change the electoral landscape, commentators declared. ''I'm Kevin from Queensland and I'm here to help,'' chortled Rudd. ''And he's Peter from Queensland and he's also here to help.'' Delighted laughter all round.

The laughter took on a different edge when, within hours of the deal being announced, Queensland's major newspaper, The Courier Mail - published by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, accused by Rudd of fierce bias against Labor - headlined its front-page picture of Rudd with Beattie: ''Send in the Clown''.

Parochial triumphalism clearly had its limits: in the froth surrounding Rudd's return to the leadership in late June, The Courier-Mail featured a photo of Rudd alongside the winning Queensland State of Origin rugby league team with the screaming headline: ''WE RULE''.

Still. Beattie, Labor's hypothesis went, would range across Queensland, his powers as a political salesman freeing Rudd to work marginal areas of other states.

It was as if, in what has become a presidential-style campaign ever since Labor adopted the slogan ''A New Way'', Rudd had appointed a sort of vice-president for Queensland.

Beattie has indeed made a number of sorties around the state, but to little apparent effect. The polls had Labor going backwards almost everywhere. And now, many doubt he will even make it to Parliament.

This week, Fairfax Media found Beattie campaigning at a suburban train station in the electorate of Forde, south of Brisbane, where he is struggling to get traction.

A man marches purposefully towards him. ''Pleased to meet you,'' the voter tells Beattie before getting to the point. ''I've got some bad news. I'm not going to vote for you.''

The man says he supported Beattie when he was premier but is now dissatisfied with both major parties.

Beattie, ever the diplomat, is sympathetic but then stops himself. ''I shouldn't be agreeing with you but I understand what you're saying,'' he says.

Forde is held by the Liberal National Party's Bert van Manen by just 1.6 per cent.

Beattie admits the ALP campaign has ''had its ups and downs'' and ''got off to a slow start'', but insists the momentum is coming back.

Reflecting on the notion that Queensland was going to be the state where Labor could pick up seats, Beattie concedes: ''It'll be a lot harder than we all thought. But this is a campaign which really is going to come down to the wire in my feel, having run a few, and I think this seat will come down to the wire, I think that the campaign will come down to the wire.

''We're trying to fight back and that's why I'm out every morning at 6.30 and we're going to the whole electorate without fanfare, without media, all that sort of stuff, to try and make sure that we establish ourselves,'' he says. Seven Network's Sunrise waits around the corner to film him campaigning.

Meanwhile, Rudd's requirement to pay attention to other states hasn't helped him in Brisbane.

When he pulled out of a big community forum in his home town on the day it was to be held last week, having accepted six weeks previously, the normally sober Fairfax Media website The Brisbane Times described it as a snub and featured a picture of the back of Rudd's head, his hands raised in a two-finger ''up yours'' salute.

Wayne Swan, who quit as Treasurer when Rudd replaced Julia Gillard, attended the forum, but soon found himself asked how he could serve in a Rudd administration after he had described Rudd as possessing no Labor values. He responded by saying he was proud that as treasurer, he had put in place measures during the first Rudd government that had saved Australia from recession.

Swan, campaigning in his marginal seat of Lilley on Friday, told Fairfax Media he still thought Campbell Newman's ''European austerity-type assault on spending'' was a substantial factor in the Sunshine State.

The former treasurer has chosen to meet Fairfax in a cafe called Slightly Twisted, which has stopped providing Murdoch newspapers for customers in a protest at the anti-Labor election coverage. Despite being on friendly turf, Swan concedes: ''It's a tough environment.

''We've got to do better than we did last time. That's the objective. I'm not a poll predictor and I don't run around doing predictions of what the outcome's going to be.''

But two polls - one by The Guardian-Lonergan, the other by Newspoll - found that Rudd was in trouble in his own seat of Griffith. It is Labor's safest Queensland electorate, on a margin of 8.5 per cent. Most analysts find it difficult to believe the Prime Minister could lose Griffith, but the mere fact that two polls found he was trailing the Liberal National Party's Dr Bill Glasson 48-52 pointed to the depths of Labor's Queensland trouble.

Much, then, hangs on today's launch, a peculiar term considering there is less than a week remaining. Political parties keep charging the taxpayer for the logistics of a campaign - the frantic jet-about travel of the leader, for instance - until the official launch. So they leave it late.

Rudd had another reason for holding off. He and his colleagues had theorised a Brisbane bash, with fine speeches and a theatrical stage production, to build on the momentum that Queensland had fed into his weeks of electioneering.